Are SANs unreliable?
- by chaos
So at the place where I wear one of my various hats, this one representing a development rather than admin role, there's been an initiative to move to SANs. So far, I have been spectacularly unimpressed. First it was this behavior where, when MySQL databases are on the SAN, the first few tables that anything tries to hit after the system boots come up as nonexistent and MySQL has to be restarted before it realizes they're actually there. Then today, on multiple systems (including the primary SVN repository, ever-so-wonderfully) we get SAN mounts spewing IO errors and the filesystems going into read-only, which is the kind of behavior I expect from directly mounted naked disks, not fault-tolerant managed storage.
Right now, I'm at the point where if I were putting together a project and somebody said "hey we should use SANs", my response would be "GTFO". So basically I want to know whether my experience is typical or even common, or whether I'm having some kind of freakishly bad luck with SANs.
The systems these SANs are attached to are all CentOS machines, if that's relevant.
